Winkler: 6/17/04
Who Are the Melungeons?
Defining “Melungeon”
Other difficulties in establishing Melungeon identity
What documentation is there, and how valid is it?
Documentation – 19th Century
Documentation – 20th Century
So, are you a Melungeon or not?
| Wayne Winkler Presented at Fifth Union Kingsport, Tennessee Thursday 17 June 2004 This presentation is entitled “Who Are the Melungeons” – not “Who Were the Melungeons.” I do not claim to know with any certainty where the Melungeons originated; anyone who makes such a claim is either mistaken or has access to information no one else has found. Furthermore, I am personally not very curious about the origins of our people. Certainly I would like to know where my ancestors came from, but I can live with the mystery; in fact, I rather like the fact that I have mysterious origins. I am more concerned with who the Melungeons are today, and who they were during the past century, than with who they were 300 or 500 years ago. I didn’t know Vardemon Collins, Paul Bunch, Shep Gibson, or any of the earliest recorded Melungeons. I would like to know more about them, but very little is recorded. On the other hand, I knew my grandmother, my father, my aunts, uncles, and cousins – these were the Melungeons whose lives interested me the most. A generation ago, writers were predicting the imminent demise of the Melungeons as a distinct people. However, the Melungeons have not gone quietly into the recesses of history. Instead, more and more people have discovered their Melungeon heritage and have chosen to acknowledge and celebrate their ethnic diversity. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before 1968, I had never heard of Melungeons – that summer, I read an article about an upcoming outdoor drama about the Melungeons and discovered I was one. Many of us share that experience – even people who lived on Newman’s Ridge or in other Melungeon areas often learned of their heritage from magazine and newspaper articles. Information about our unique ethnic heritage was very rarely passed on from parents to children because of the stigma attached to the label “Melungeon.” |
This current interest in Melungeons has drawn critics. Much of what is sometimes known as the “Melungeon Movement” is centered around the work of Brent Kennedy, who has described his 1994 book The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People as a “manifesto.” In this work, he proposed many theories of Melungeon origin based on historical possibilities. He also argued that the Melungeons were a much broader-based population than previously assumed. Although Kennedy had hoped his work would inspire others to probe more deeply into the mystery, he instead attracted a great deal of criticism from researchers felt his research was not conclusive, or that he was going against conventional academic wisdom about mixed-race people – namely, that these populations were simply the result of the interbreeding of colonial Americans of European, African, and Indian ancestry. Kennedy’s argument for a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern component to the Melungeon gene pool was interpreted by some as a denial of African ancestry, long a goal of many mixed race people who wished to avoid discrimination in years past. Recent DNA tests, along with previous blood studies, have shown that Kennedy’s theories are possible. For the most part, Kennedy’s academic critics have backed away from the subject. However, in the last two or three years, a new form of critic has emerged. These critics are not academics or researchers, although many have extensive collections of information. Claiming to represent the so-called “historical Melungeons,” these critics claim Melungeons were limited to a very few families only found in Hancock County, that only a few researchers and writers (mostly from the 19th century) have portrayed the Melungeons accurately, and that the vast majority of those trying to establish a genealogical link to the Melungeons are merely “wannabes” – as in “they wanna be Melungeons.” Most of all, they focus their criticisms toward Brent Kennedy and, to a lesser extent, on the Melungeon Heritage Association which Kennedy helped form. At this point, it is important to stress that I do not include serious researchers in this group of “neo-critics.” Respected researchers including Virginia DeMarce, Jack Goins, Darlene Wilson, Mike Nassau, Eloy Gallegos, and others have all taken issue with various aspects of Kennedy’s work – and with each others’ work as well. Academic debate is essential, and it’s all a part of the process – especially since no one has all the answers anyway. These researchers debate each other, often in a lively manner, but almost always with mutual respect and admiration. The “neo-critics” began popping up on the Internet mail lists about four years ago. Since then, they’ve created a couple of websites and mail groups that are devoted to the idea that the Melungeons are a tiny remnant of people found only in the vicinity on Newman’s Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee, and that those who try to promote further interest in and research about Melungeons are charlatans. Though the “neo-critics” claim fealty to “documentation,” they are very selective in which documents they use, often preferring biased, second-hand 19th century reports to more modern research. Their insistence on “documentation” sometimes gives them an air of authority that intimidates newcomers to Melungeon research. If that doesn’t intimidate the “newbies,” the hostility and arrogance expressed on these lists often does. So there are some would-be researchers out there with personality problems who don’t like some of the other researchers. What difference does it make? Unfortunately, most of the people who begin searching for their Melungeon roots are not used to academic debate, which can sometimes be brutal – as Henry Kissinger once said about academia, the passions are so high because the stakes are so small. And Kissinger was talking about real researchers, not people who are working out their hostility and anger issues online. These few people set up such an air of hostility and unreason that they have driven many people off the mailing lists. They have even gone so far as to slander the reputation of respected researchers and scientists who have taken an interest in this subject. Others have not been driven away by this attitude, but have developed an unrealistic view of Melungeons as a result. The good news is that this “backlash phenomenon” is limited to a surprisingly few people on the Internet, some of whom don’t use their own names and post under more than one alias, making their numbers seem larger. Actually, there are so few that I recently referred to them as the “Dirty Half-Dozen.” But then someone reminded me that the guys in the movie The Dirty Dozen turned out to be heroes in the end, so let’s just refer to them as “The Exclusionists,” because their main theme seems to be “I’m a Melungeon but you’re not.” The best news, at least for those who wish to learn about their Melungeon roots, is that the “exclusionists” are wrong. The very documents they claim to respect so highly disprove the very points they try to make. The “narrow definition” arguments The ‘exclusionists” message seems to revolve around a few main arguments. a. You are not a Melungeon unless you can prove ancestry from a “documented” historical Melungeon b. Melungeon was a term tied to a specific location and referred only to a specific group of people who lived there. If Vardy Collins’ brother didn’t live in that specific location, he wasn’t a Melungeon. In short, only people who were called Melungeons by their neighbors were Melungeons, and that term was restricted to the Hawkins/Hancock County area c. The litmus test for being a Melungeon is having an ancestor who was listed as “mulatto” or “FPC” in a Census record – preferably a Hawkins County record d. The current interest in Melungeons is some sort of scam meant to make a profit. One web article portrays Brent Kennedy as some sort of huckster, quote, “oozing charisma,” and suggests that one of the main purposes of the Melungeon Heritage Association was to hustle free vacations to Turkey Not every one of the half-dozen or so people I would term “exclusionists” would agree with each of these items. And some of these arguments – or variations there of -- have been used in the past by true academic researchers. There is a lot of room for legitimate debate about many aspects of the Melungeons, and I will address these issues presently. However, it is important to understand some of the problems inherent in the study of the Melungeons – not the least of which is the word “Melungeon” itself. |
Defining “Melungeon”
| Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1981) lists ”melungeon, also malungeon: (me’ lenjen-s) usu. cap [origin unknown]: one of a group of mixed Indian, white, and Negro ancestry in the southern Appalachians esp. of eastern Tennessee.” Since the origin of the word is unknown, it is extremely difficult to determine why it was applied to this particular group of people. The first written record of the word was located by Jack Goins, who found a mention dating from 1813 in the minutes for Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia. The Stony Creek minutes simply referred to one parishioner criticizing another for “harboring them melungins.” None of “them melungins” were identified by name, nor was there any suggestion of an origin or meaning for the word. In fact, until Swan Burnett wrote about the Melungeons in late 1880s no known written source ever suggested a source for the word. By the time of Burnett’s article, the word had been in use for at least the better part of a century. Meanwhile, articles had been written and court cases decided, but no solid evidence was presented as to either the source of the word “Melungeon” or the precise definition of whom the word described. Several sources have been suggested for the term – no solid evidence for any. The various suggested origins for the word are well known by now: French (mélange, meaning mixture), Arabic/Turkish (melun-jinn, meaning “cursed soul”), Old English (malengine, meaning deceitful, full of guile), and even Portuguese (melongene, meaning “eggplant”). But we e don’t even know who started using the term. Did the Melungeons use it for themselves? Was it imposed upon them? If so, by whom? The word “Melungeon” has been used in several contexts over the years, exclusive of any ethnic connotations. In the 1840s, the noted Whig publisher William Brownlow referred to a Democratic speaker as an “impudent Melungeon.” Brownlow described “Melungeon” as half-black, half-Indian, but it was clear that Brownlow objected to his politics at least as much as to his color. The political connotation of the word “Melungeon” continued after the Civil War, as Democrats from West and Middle Tennessee sometimes referred to East Tennessee Republicans as “Melungeons.” “Melungeon” also had a socio-economic aspect, with almost always a negative connotation: poor, shiftless, and untrustworthy. One might ask if the term originally had anything at all to do with ethnicity, or did it refer to the character of the person so identified? Again, there is no conclusive evidence either way. |
Other difficulties in establishing Melungeon identity
| No official records exist identifying any individual as a “Melungeon.” Some are listed in census reports or other records as “mulatto,” “free person of color,” or some other designation indicating a non-European ancestry, but the term “Melungeon” does not show up in any records. Therefore, one of the simplest methods by which most people can identify the ethnicity of their ancestors is not available to Melungeons; the records simply do not exist. The Melungeons had no cohesive organization such as tribe or clan to provide sense of membership. In fact, as Edward Price pointed out, there was no community who thought of themselves as Melungeons. No one in a given area could say what a Melungeon was exactly, but those who lived near them could all tell you who was a Melungeon. However, those so identified would likely disagree on who was and wasn’t a Melungeon. And, of course, few families ever passed on information about their Melungeon heritage rarely passed on to succeeding generations. Some have looked to DNA testing to establish a Melungeon connection, but there is no “Melungeon gene.” Melungeons are a mixture of ethnicities; each family has its own unique mixture, and not all the genetic markers associated with ethnic identity show up on DNA tests. Obviously, unless one has knowledge from family or neighbors of one’s Melungeon ancestry, it is extremely difficult to determine that a connection exists. One of the most complex questions surrounding Melungeon-related family research is the question of WHEN these families became “Melungeons.” Whatever the word might have meant when it was entered into the 1813 Stony Creek Church minutes, we don’t know how long the term had been in use prior to that time. It seems logical that it would have been a word whose meaning was commonly known; otherwise, it probably wouldn’t have been used in the church minutes. On the other hand, no earlier reference has been found; as far as we know, the church secretary might have made the word up the day he or she wrote it in the minutes. Clearly the early Melungeons were a mixture of different ethnicities, but were they all of the same mixture? Again, no evidence exists whatsoever. One can surmise that these individuals and families had backgrounds that were at least similar; there were some bonds that kept these family groups close together. Those bonds might have been forged through shared culture and ethnicity – or simply resulted from a disparate group of dark-skinned people congregating for mutual defense and support. To understand the complexity of this issue, here is a hypothetical situation: you somehow learn that you are descended from Vardy Collins’ great-great grandfather. We know Vardy Collins was a Melungeon. Does that make you a Melungeon? Perhaps – but not necessarily. That g-g-grandfather might have been Indian – or Portuguese – or African – or English – or Turkish. Clearly, some individuals and family lines are descended from the same ancestors as the Melungeons, but are not Melungeon themselves because their family lines did not mix in the same way as others. Obviously, there are numerous and complex questions concerning the makeup of the original Melungeons. In order to discuss this population, we have to have a starting point, one that most researchers can agree upon (and I well know the hazards of assuming that researchers are going to agree on anything). But we can identify certain individuals who were identified by several sources as the first Melungeons on Newman’s Ridge and in the Blackwater Valley region. These include Vardemon Collins, Paul Bunch, Shepherd Gibson, Benjamin Collins, Solomon Collins and others whose names appear on land and tax records for the region about 1800. Certainly there were others – people who shared the same genetic, family, and cultural traits as these individuals who moved on to other locations. Their descendents certainly have valid reason to claim Melungeon heritage if they desire. But for the sake of discussion, let us accept these first Melungeon families in the Newman’s Ridge region as the first documented Melungeons. We know some of them moved through Virginia and North Carolina before arriving in the Clinch River region, but since the first recorded use of the word “Melungeon” (or at least a variant spelling) occurred early in the 19th century, most researchers consider this group to be the “original” Melungeons. The self-styled “experts” on some Melungeon lists and websites claim that these are the only Melungeons – that the term was not used elsewhere, and that the Melungeon population was quite small and isolated. In this idea, they echo the words of one prominent genealogist who limited the use of the term “Melungeon” to this small population. However, even the limited amount of documentation from the 19th century that refers to Melungeons demonstrates that the Melungeons began migrating from the Newman’s Ridge area early in the 19th century, spread to various locations, and – perhaps most importantly in the eyes of some – were known as Melungeons in their respective communities. By the time true scientists began studying triracial communities in the 1940s, recognized communities whose members were known as “Melungeons” had been documented in several locations, and individual Melungeon families had spread across the nation. |
What documentation is there, and how valid is it?
| The short answer is: not much, and far too little of it is valid. Nearly everything written about the Melungeons in the 19th century was written by a journalist or based on journalistic reports. As one who has been trained and worked as a journalist, I have great respect for the profession – but also a realistic knowledge of its history. Nineteenth-century journalism rarely lived up to the standards taught in journalism schools today (for that matter, few of today’s working journalists do). Newspapers of that period were known for sensationalism, quite often at the expense of accuracy. Reporters often found it useful to “spice up” a story with unverified tales or even outright fabrications in order to get a story into print. Even those journalists whose intent was to portray the Melungeons as accurately as possible were outsiders who spent a relatively brief time among Melungeons – certainly not enough time to gain their trust or to develop any real sense of their character. Furthermore, these writers saw the Melungeons through the filters of their own biases and prejudices, and had very little understanding or sympathy for those whose lives were different. As a result, while these reports provide most of the few existing references to Melungeons of that period, they need to be examined critically with recognition of the biases and motivations of the writer. Not until the mid-20th century did true scientists begin examining the tri-racial phenomenon. Eugenicists had taken notice of tri-racials earlier, but only in an effort to segregate or eliminate them; their work did nothing to add to our knowledge of tri-racials. Let us examine the available documentation about the Melungeons make some reasonable assumptions – where possible -- about what it indicates. |
Documentation – 19th Century
| The word “melungin” appears in the minutes of Stony Creek Church in Scott County,Virginia in 1813. This is the first written record of the word, and provides frustratingly little information about the people so designated. The document provides no definition of the word or even a suggestion of one. No one identified by name in minutes as Melungeon; we can only infer who the Melungeons were because some family names later identified as Melungeon appear in these minutes. By 1813, many of these families had moved on down the Clinch River into a portion of Hawkins County that became Hancock County in 1846. Though the Stony Creek minutes offer precious little solid information about the Melungeons, it does place this term in a geographical area at a particular point in time. It would be many more years before the word appeared in print again. As noted earlier, you will not find the designation “Melungeon” on any official records. You might find an “FPC” or “mulatto” designation on a census record. If your ancestor was in Hawkins/Hancock County and was listed as “mulatto” or “FPC” in a census report from the early 19th century, that ancestor was almost certainly Melungeon. The 1830 Census indicated 331 “free persons of color” in Hawkins County. In recent census counts, respondents have usually filled out their own reports and indicated whatever they choose when asked for ethnic classification. When workers in the 2000 Census visited homes and asked questions personally, they were instructed to record whatever ethnic category the respondent claimed. This was not the procedure in early censuses; enumerators made their own determinations about “race,” and as noted by Calvin Beale, “race” is very often in the eye of the enumerator. Undoubtedly many families were given the benefit of any doubts the enumerator might have had; others were designated “fpc” solely on the opinion of the census taker. It is important to note that “free person of color” and “mulatto” were not precise definitions. Today we generally assume “free person of color” to be an African-American who was not enslaved, and a “mulatto” to be a mixture of European and African ancestry. However, these terms were also used to describe people of a wide variety of ancestries, and usage was not consistent from one enumerator to another. However, some 19th century documentation can strongly indicate a Melungeon ancestry. If your ancestor was designated as “FPC” or “mulatto” in the Clinch River region in the early 19th century, that ancestor was almost certainly a Melungeon, especially if that ancestor had one of the surnames commonly associated with our people. Lack of such documentation, however, only proves that the census enumerator considered the person in question to be “white.” The same 1830 census that showed 331 "free persons of color" in Hawkins County, Tennessee, also documented four separate units of the Goins family in Hamilton County in southeast Tennessee. Earlier records indicate these families migrated from Clinch River region, but had moved by 1830. In 1840, Whig politician and publisher William G. Brownlow identified a speaker at a Democratic rally as an “impudent Melungeon,” defining Melungeon as “half-Indian, half negro.” Brownlow was a man of strong passions and prejudices; he later served as Governor of Tennessee during Reconstruction and aroused passions among opponents that lasted over a century. It’s impossible to know how precise Brownlow was being in his description of the “impudent Melungeon’s” ethnic heritage, but his article is the earliest known description of what a Melungeon was. Although the term is clearly used as a racial epithet, it has also has political overtones. One wonders whether a “half-Indian, half-negro” who was not politically opposed to Brownlow would have been described as a “Melungeon.” Again, we cannot answer that question, but the political use of the epithet “Melungeon” would continue in Tennessee for decades. One more item worth noting about Brownlow’s Whig article is that the “impudent Melungeon” was not identified by name. Up to this point in history, not one individual has been identified in any known record as a Melungeon. We know they existed; we just don’t have a name yet. The illegal voting trial in Hawkins County in 1846 indirectly identifies several Melungeon men. “Vardy” Collins, Solomon Collins, Ezekiel Collins, Levi Collins, Andrew Collins, Wiatt Collins, Zachariah Minor, and Lewis Minor were charged with voting illegally “by reason of color.” We know these men to be Melungeons because their descendants were identified as such, but the word “Melungeon” does not exist in any surviving trial records. Those records are sadly incomplete, but Jack Goins is now working on a project with some recently discovered Hawkins County records, and if any further evidence about the trial exists, Jack will uncover it. We do know that some defendants were acquitted and charges dropped against the others, but the records give us little more than that. Littel’s Living Age was a 19th century equivalent of the Reader’s Digest -- it reprinted articles from other publications for national distribution. In 1849, Living Age published an article that had appeared in at least one newspaper, and possibly others. We do not know when the article was actually written, or when the events it describes took place, but the article is notable for two things. It contains the first mention of the oft-repeated Melungeon claim of Portuguese ancestry. And it names at least one Melungeon – Vardemon “Vardy” Collins – by name. Other names used in the article are probably pseudonyms, or the author misheard them – in any event, these surnames do not reappear in any later accounts of the Melungeons. Darlene Wilson has recently noted that Kentuckian E. O Guerrant wrote in his diaries from the Civil War about meeting Melungeons in southeastern Kentucky. While Guerrant had traveled in East Tennessee and might have heard the term there, he applied it to people in southeastern Kentucky, where many people from the Clinch River region had migrated. This would appear to be one of the few records of the term being used to describe specific people during the Civil War. Decades later, several apocryphal stories drew on folklore about the depredations of Melungeons during the Civil War, but the only documents reflecting Melungeon activity during that period are the service records of dozens of men from the Clinch River region with Melungeon surnames, most of whom served with the Union Army. In 1872, attorney Lewis Shepherd defended a Melungeon girl in an inheritance case in Chattanooga. He identified a local family, the Boltons, as Melungeons. If the court had decided that the Boltons – and by extension, the Melungeons, were legally Negroes, the girl’s claim to her father’s estate would be ruled invalid because her parents’ marriage had been illegal. Shepherd argued that the Melungeons descended from ancient Carthaginians who migrated to America via Portugal. His later account of the trial offered no source for this evidence, but Jack Goins suggests rather convincingly that Shepherd’s argument had originated as the defense used in the 1846 Hawkins County trial, which Shepherd would certainly have researched. This trial demonstrates that people known by the name “Melungeon” lived far from the Clinch River region by the mid-19th century. Census and tax records show families with Melungeon surnames moving from Hamilton County north into Rhea County after about 1880. Family names included Goins, Bolin, Collins, and Bell – names that match the Melungeon surnames in the Clinch River region. Swan Burnett’s 1889 lecture and article brought the Melungeons a measure of national recognition, but did not mention any Melungeons by name. However, the following year, Will Allen Dromgoole followed her curiosity to Newman’s Ridge, and the result still ranks – for good and ill – as one of the most influential series of documents ever written about the Melungeons. Her 1890 Nashville American articles identified Calloway Collins by name. By the time she had rewritten her articles for national publication in The Arena, she identified other individual Melungeons, including historical figures such as Shep Gibson along with persons living at that time. She offered some rudimentary genealogies of some Melungeon families and offered theories on their origins—theories that seem to vary in the first three articles but seem quite definite in the final installment. There is much that can be said about Dromgoole, and for information on her work, your best source is the work of Dr, Kathy Lyday-Lee at Elon University. Suffice it to say that Dromgoole’s articles reflected the racism shared by the majority of whites of her day, and her description of the Melungeons as “a blot upon our state” sums up her general attitude about our ancestors. After Dromgoole’s articles, others visited Hancock County in search of interesting subjects for magazines and newspapers. In 1897, an article by C. H. Humble identified Batey Collins as “chief” of the clan. Humble also repeated the Melungeon claim of Portuguese heritage Two things are clear from the documentation of the 19th century. First, prior to Dromgoole’s articles at the end of the century, the only person identified by name AS A MELUNGEON, at least in any existing records, was Vardemon Collins. Second, Melungeons had definitely spread far beyond the immediate area of Newman’s Ridge and the Clinch River by mid-century. Many Melungeons – entire families, in fact -- were never identified as such in any of the 19th century records. The few who visited Hancock County and wrote about it didn’t meet all the Melungeons there, much less those who had moved on generations before. Nineteenth century documentation on the Melungeons simply does not existing enough quantity or quality to give us any certainty about anything --except the fact that there was a population known as Melungeons centered in the Clinch River region with some family members migrating to other locations throughout the century. |
Documentation – 20th Century
| Sneedville, Tennessee attorney Lewis Jarvis gave an interview about the Melungeons in 1903, but his recollections more properly belong with the 19th century documentation, since he provides the earliest first-hand account of Melungeons by someone who actually knew them. He did not provide any sort of definitive list of Melungeon families; he listed several of the earliest settlers by name, along with “some others.” He describes them as primarily an Indian people, but his account is disappointingly brief and provides little insight into their lives. Throughout the early 20th century, writers would discover some earlier reference to Melungeons – usually Dromgoole’s articles – and write their own. Some simply re-write earlier accounts; others followed Dromgoole’s footsteps to Hancock County. In1912 Paul Converse published “The Melungeons” in Southern Collegian, which provided the first written record of Mahala Mullins, the fabled Melungeon matriarch and moonshiner. O. N. Walraven’s entry in the Tennessee edition of the Federal Writers project Guide to the States (1940) refers to Oakdale, near Harriman: “In the village is a small colony of Melungeons, a dark-skinned people found only in the mountainous regions of East Tennessee and western North Carolina.” Walraven, like some later researchers, restricts the Melungeons to a specific area – but it is a different area than that specified by the later researchers; Walraven doesn’t mention Hancock County or Newman’s Ridge at all. Bonnie Ball began writing articles about Melungeons in 1944, eventually compiling her work into a book. She describes Melungeon families in the Stickleyville, Virginia area, where she grew up. In 1946, William Gilbert, a researcher with the Library of Congress, compiled information on the ten largest groups what he considered “remnant” Indian groups: the Brass Ankles, Cajans and Creoles, Croatans, Guineas, Issues, Jackson Whites, Melungeons, Moors and Nanticokes, Red Bones, and Wesorts. Gilbert’s work was the first to compare Melungeons with these other groups, and inspired further research by Edward Price and Calvin Beale in the next decade. Unfortunately, William Worden, author of “Sons of the Legend” in the 18 October 1947 edition of the Saturday Evening Post ignored Gilbert’s work; he treated Melungeons as an isolated phenomenon. His article repeated all the old legends and quoted heavily from Dromgoole’s work. Worden didn’t quote any Melungeons, however, at least not for attribution. He did quote others, such as the Rev. Chester Leonard of the Vardy School and Mission. Leonard was rather vague about Melungeons; he knew it was a sensitive topic and the word was considered an insult. Worden’s next sentence, however, suggests that no Melungeons had gone on to graduate college, and the reader might easily infer that this information came from, or was corroborated by, Leonard. This was certainly not the case; Leonard knew full well that Vardy had produced college graduates, one of which was on the Vardy faculty at the time. Bonnie Ball and Hancock County historian Bill Grohse believed Worden never set foot in the county, but got all his information from his photographer. Worden’s description of Hancock County geography is certainly wrong, locating Blackwater Swamp on the wrong side of Newman’s Ridge. Local reaction to article was extremely negative, possibly more so among non-Melungeons than Melungeons. Many Hancock County residents felt that the article portrayed the county negatively, and implied that all county residents were “tainted” with this mixed-race heritage. One Hancock County girl dropped out of East Tennessee State Teacher’s College because of the embarrassment caused by this article. Geographer Edward Price begins publishing research on tri-racial groups in 1951. He identified Hancock County as the center of the population, but also noted in populations Bristol and Kingsport, Tennessee, Dungannon (Scott County), Virginia, and Wise County, Virginia, Letcher and Knott Counties in Kentucky (not identified locally as Melungeons but many in this group had the surnames Collins, Gibson, and Sexton). In Rhea County, Tennessee, Price found a concentrated Melungeon group in one community; he estimated the Melungeons made up thirty to forty percent of the population of 800. Another group of about two-dozen families in Bazeltown, near Harriman, Tennessee, was dominated by the Goins surname, and was the only Melungeon group to be “socially classified as colored.” Price noted other Melungeon communities near Nashville and in Bell’s Bend on the Cumberland River. Calvin L. Beale conducted a thorough study on tri-racial populations during the 1950’s, which he can explain in much greater detail in his presentation. A 1969 study by Dr. Byron Stinson involved a Melungeon community – identified by that term – in Ohio. The study was a replication of research comparing sticky versus dry earwax among Native Americans. The study itself may not generate much excitement among Melungeon researches (except those interested in evidence pointing toward Indian ancestry, or those fascinated by earwax), but the significance of the study is that the term “Melungeon” was in use in an Ohio community in 1969. At this time, few people used that term to describe themselves even in private. Claude Collins and others connected with the outdoor drama in Sneedville were practically the only people who used that term in public. Obviously, the word “Melungeon” had been used for some time to describe these people in Ohio. Jean Patterson Bible’s 1975 book on Melungeons, while focusing on Hancock County, cites Melungeon communities in Virginia, Kentucky, and southeast Tennessee. This was the last major work on Melungeons before the publication of Brent Kennedy’s 1994 book, aside from articles by Virginia DeMarce and Devid Henige. And this is the proper place to end discussion of 20th century documentation of the Melungeons, because although Kennedy’s book beat the millennium by a few years, it essentially ushered in 21st century Melungeon research. That chapter is just beginning, and we’re all part of it – those of us writing and speaking about Melungeons and other mixed-race populations, and those of us listening and reading and researching our own families. What is clear from the documented evidence is that the origins of the Melungeons are vague. Early records show some surnames among various Indian tribes that later appear among the Melungeons and other tri-racial groups, and some Melungeon forebears were identified as “fpc,” “mulatto,” or “Indian,” but these designations were subjective’ other Melungeon families were identified as “white.” Land records show that the ancestors of families later identified as Melungeons by Dromgoole and others were living on Newman’s ridge, in Blackwater Valley, and the rest of the Clinch River region by the beginning of the 19th century, where he term “Melungeon” was first documented in the in 1813. This is the “starting point” of the people we know as Melungeons. And the records of two centuries clearly show that from this location, many branches of these core families migrated to other areas while others remained near that “starting point.” Simply stated, any argument that the Melungeons were a small population found only in the Hawkins/Hancock County region of Tennessee is not supported by either historical documents or by the relatively widespread use of the term. Even if this population was located almost entirely in the Clinch River region in 1813, some had demonstrably migrated elsewhere by 1830. |
So, are you a Melungeon or not?
| I could probably make a fair amount of money if I had a sure-fire way to prove the Melungeon ancestry of those who don’t have documentation or family history. But for those who have become discouraged by self-styled experts on Internet mail groups, I hope I have countered some of the distortions of what little historical record exists. The simple truth is that there is not enough documentation of those early Melungeon families to tell exactly who was a Melungeon back then, much less now. So when some self-proclaimed (but anonymous) descendant of a “historical” Melungeon tells you, “You are not a Melungeon unless you can prove ancestry from a “documented” historical Melungeon,” remember that the only person ever identified by name as a “Melungeon” prior to 1890 – nearly a century after the Melungeons came to the region -- was Vardy Collins. Most Melungeons of the 19th century were NOT interviewed by journalists, or documented as a “Melungeon” in any way Many researchers have considered the use of a colloquial term by neighbors toward an individual or family as the “litmus test” for their inclusion in that particular group. For example, you were a “Melungeon” if your neighbors called you a Melungeon. There is no question that this would certainly settle the question for most people. I heard my grandmother called “Melungeon” as a youngster, and have never required any further proof of my ancestry. Claude Collins had an even more dramatic enlightenment; he read about his family being Melungeons in the Saturday Evening Post. However, relatively few people outside the “core” Melungeon region got that information so definitively. The families who moved away from the core Melungeon areas almost invariably left that information out of the family history they passed onto their children. And many people in Hancock County didn’t learn of their Melungeon ancestry until the subject became socially acceptable in the wake of the outdoor drama Walk Toward the Sunset. Besides, as Edward Price noted in the 1950s, there was no group of people who identified themselves as “Melungeons” or thought of themselves as separate from the general community. Melungeons were defined by their non-Melungeon neighbors, but Price noted that even those neighbors sometimes disagreed on who was or was not a Melungeon. Again, the socio-economic aspect of the term may have influenced whom the community considered “Melungeon”; educated and successful people could potentially escape that designation. Ironically, it was exactly those people who began proudly proclaiming their Melungeon heritage in the late 1960s. Those who some would have considered the “real” Melungeons were often those who most vehemently denied it. Melungeon identity has always been a fairly complex subject, and it hasn’t become any easier. Using a combination of available family history and genealogy, combined with a thorough knowledge of Melungeon history and known migration patterns, one can often make a reasonable assumption of Melungeon heritage. Sometimes your search will uncover ancestors of obvious multi-ethnic heritage, but no apparent connection to known Melungeon or other recognized tri-racial communities. While these people may not have been known by any colloquial names, they most certainly experienced all the hardships faced by other tri-racial groups – and possibly did so without the support of an extended community. All you can do is use the best information available and decide for yourself. It is not for self-styled “experts” on the Internet to tell you whether or not you are a Melungeon. Do your own homework and make up your own mind. You might have to be satisfied with “maybe” or “probably.” If someone challenges your right to identify yourself as a Melungeon, or to pursue your search for possible Melungeon ancestry, you should question their motives, not your own. If we identify ourselves as “Melungeons,” or “Melungeon descendants,” what does it mean? Melungeons have no special holidays or traditions, other than perhaps attending the Unions. Our traditional culture is Appalachian; we may have influenced Appalachian culture more than has been recognized, but while we were sometimes separate from our neighbors, our lives were very similar to theirs There’s no financial gain involved in being a Melungeon; we have no claims for land or reparations. Despite the implications made on one website, there’s not any financial gain in being a Melungeon researcher or member of the Melungeon Heritage Association – it costs us money to pursue this interest. Even if we write a book, we have to sell an awful lot of them to receive a very small royalty. Everyone at Fifth Union paid their own expenses to be here, including the presenters and the organizers, as did those who attended. We are all here for the same reason: we want to know who we are. So what does it mean to be Melungeon? First of all, it means we reject to some degree the very thing our ancestors worked very hard to achieve – status as “white” people. Instead, we celebrate our “non-white” heritage as well as that of our white ancestors. We celebrate this because we can; our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of choice. Therefore, we can, in a sense, “liberate” the spirits of our forebears who struggled to hide or deny their non-white ancestry as a matter of survival. Being Melungeon today means we recognize the uniqueness of our individual family histories while celebrating the common bonds that kept our people together as a cohesive group for over two centuries. It means we acknowledge our descent from various people who were on the margins of American society. We recognize and appreciate the hardships our ancestors faced due to discrimination and ignorance, and we celebrate the fact that they were survivors – that they lasted long enough to produce offspring, which is why we are here today. And that in itself is worth commemorating. Wayne Winkler is director of public radio station WETS-FM http://www.wets.org and president of the Melungeon Heritage Association. He is the author of Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia, published by Mercer University Press in March 2004. He lives in Jonesborough, Tennessee with his wife Andrea and their children Claire and Josef. |
